The amount of newsroom jobs fell 60% between 2008 and 2020. The vast majority of what was lost were "beat" reporters - foreign bureaus, Washington bureaus from regional publications, statehouse reporters, or regional specialty beats (science, law, etc).
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.
> This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?
2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.
For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).
I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.
Let me rephrase it: "long before the decline of the open internet, and the rise of AI".
I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.
Salon has always been pure opinion/analysis pieces though, they never had a newsroom. They never had much of a moat beyond getting talented people to write thinkpieces for them, and the internet has just inflated the supply of thinkpieces to the point of 0 cost.
I suspect it is. I think the real problem was sites like craigslist (and online advertising in general) removing much of the (classified, job listing, etc) advertising that made publishing a newspaper profitable.
In roughly the same stretch global mobility exploded; from numbers like 2-3 billion flying around to travel, to 6+ billion...almost the entire population
And each of them can journal on their phones
Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers
And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared
All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism
We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.
Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.
It is no coincidence that this has occurred together with an increasing feminization of journalism.
Women, it turns out, do not want to be beat reporters.
And I doubt the pendulum is done swinging. Buckle up! My guess is that journalism will get even more hollowed out, and even more feminized - as with so many other careers (HR, anyone?) it seems we are continuing in the direction of UBI by proxy.
This is really good and worth reading. Important thing to understand: like Newsweek, Salon is (was) a zombie brand, as much an SEO play as anything else.
It is a good read. When I was living in Europe in the early 2000s, Salon was something I would read regularly. It had some good reporting and articles. Glen Greenwald even wasn't off his rocker back then.
A good reminder that if you live in a city that still has an independent news source, throw them a lifeline by subscribing digitally! It's easy and usually doesn't cost more than a couple bucks a week.
I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.
yes, I remember reading both Salon and Slate back in the 90s. it was a big deal when Michael Kinsley, the founding editor Slate, moved from the east coast to what was then considered the hinterlands of the Pacific Northwest (compared to NY / DC / LA for media). He had had fancy jobs at The New Republic, etc.
it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.
Slate has been on the same slippery slope Salon was on; so far as I know it never actually died and got reanimated like Salon, but it suffered a talent exodus and s sharp tilt towards optimization and fan service. Salon was literally a chum-box version of itself, and Slate isn't that yet, but it's still not good.
The big difference though is that Slate has always had corporate ownership, first by Microsoft and then by Graham Holdings. It's never really had to stand on its own feet.
Wow, blast from the past! I think the last time I read a Salon article was 20 years ago. They used to be staple of the old internet. I miss those days…
I loved the first version of Salon. So many excellent writers appeared in their pages; I grew to love Anne Lamott.
It changes at some point, no doubt triggered by the crash of journalism, but it didn't try to be interesting and I gave up on it so far back I don't remember when.
I haven't visited salon.com in quite a while. I remember way back in the day I'd hop on there to read an article or two and maybe go read suck.com as well. Such a different internet back then, pre-BuzzFeed and YouTube. Less clickbait, more Gen X cynicism.
On my internship the local newspaper wanted a revamped UI and I was asked to present some ideas. After searching around for references found Salon had a really clean UI and added some of its pages to the presentation spec. This was in early 2000s. Their UI today is still very clean and readable. I don’t think it has changed that much :) https://web.archive.org/web/20021130080643/http://salon.com/
Sad to see them go.
Salon used to have a terrific forum, with some of the most brilliant contributors I've seen on the web in their "International Issues" section.
One day without warning, they deleted it.
Complete contempt for writers who were frankly far superior to any on staff. I was just a lurker, I've no personal investment beyond that.
I can't remember the last time since that that I visited the site with intent; the arrogant, contemptuous destruction of brilliant writing - that's Salon's legacy for me.
The amount of early 2000's forums I can tell a similar story about is incredible ... companies willingly just jettisoning their audience.
It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.
I read Paul Krugman's 1990s columns in Slate (which I always associated with Salon as 2 similar competitors with S-names) before he became a lot better known for writing similar columns in The NY Times!
Don’t forget Glen Greenwald before he went batshit crazy.
I payed for salon briefly in the late 90s. I used to have bets with how many words it would take Paglia to cite Sexual Personnae in literally every one of here articles.
Then it just turned into everything that is cringe about the anti intellectual left. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been aligned with progressive politics for all 56 years of my life, but Salon just went off the deep end.
I used to read Salon every single day, it was great. I'm reminded of this story about living in Japan from 1998 (that now seems pretty politically incorrect):
Punditry is a kind of journalism, but far from the most important kind; what people get from Salon today they can get better from a hundred different newsletters.
I think the most damning fact about the readers of The New York Times is that they're much more interested in the opinion page (which is just Charlie Blow blowing it out his ass) than they are in the actual reporting which might concern some people you don't know in some place you never heard of that did something that involves a lot of explaining.
David French is a weird person to single out here. Dowd and Brooks don't have any real identities outside of being vapid pundits; French is a former movement conservative (and litigator) who was defenestrated for opposing the rise of Trump. You don't have to like him --- I don't read him --- but he's not really at all like Dowd or Brooks. When you make that comparison, you weaken your point, because it sounds like your real problem with NYT opinion staffing is that it includes right-of-center voices.
If you just wanted people to agree with you, Salon definitely had you covered!
Booming is a relative term. I would have to see how many writers are making a "living wage," a favored term of people in tech circles which generally means a fraction of what they make.
I agree. In the last 10 years, a huge number of popular independent journalists and pundits (opinion writers) have moved to Substack. For me, in 2026, it is the OnlyFans of blogging.
All the good news web sites got fucked, and their best stories and documenteries have been taken down, even from the archives, by thin skinned people who don't want them told.
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce, who turns into a banana at 20:30 in this video:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org snapshot of fuckedcompany.com:
It's been probably 15+ years since I visited this site, but waaaaay back in the day they had a pretty compelling lineup of politics, culture, and because they were trying to jump on the web explosion in the 2000s, tech. So I'll post this article, a tribute to one of the great tech writers of all time, W. Richard Stevens. Who would have thought that you would get choked up reading about a person who wrote guides for programming Unix (among other things) but I did when I read this. The early web was a fun time.
We need as many news organizations as we can get imo. I used to read them in the 2000s. The tone kept shifting towards negativity and vitriol and reporting perception of intentions rather than facts. Not surprised they are winding down.
The one thing burned in my brain is that when Clinton was president he was interviewed about this "new internet thing" and asked what websites he and Hilary like to read, and his answer was salon.com
Now that it's gone, I realize that after all these 31 years, I never did conclusively know if the website is pronounced suh-LON (like where hair goes to fall) or SAL-on (like the artsy fartsy gathering)?
Totally forgot Salon existed. I guess that’s part of the problem. For anyone interested in independent journalism, I strongly recommend Breaking Points.
That is a massive shame, although I stopped reading it a very long time ago, but I have fabulous memories of the place, when Patrick Smith's Ask The Pilot and Cary Tennis' Since You Asked were wonderful staples of my week.
Wow. I'm honestly shocked by this. It's been a mainstay for so long. It's as ad-riddled as other news sites, is it that ad blockers finally did them in?
I think what did them in is that they would not allow you to subscribe without handing over a ton of personal info. I don't remember the details, but I wanted to subscribe in order to support them, but when I tried the process had so much friction that I just gave up. And this is not unique to Salon. I am continually astounded at how many organizations put up intentional obstacles to giving them money.
IDK if this is a salon issue, but another major issue is so many subscription businesses have made it damn near impossible to end your subscription without sitting in a queue for an hour and having their retention specialist give you 900 offers to stay.
That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).
Never used Salon myself, but I've also seen this a lot. I assume a lot of these organisations pull in some third-party credit card processing, then when asked "do you want high security and low fraud?" they answer "Yeah of course"
Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.
Then a customer like me who is literally at the checkout trying to give them money isn't allowed to.
And they're selling digital goods - pixels are free, a non-paying customer doesn't cost them anything!
Yeah, I used to work on credit card processing so I'm very familiar with this. I don't remember the details, but my vague recollection is that Salon's process was much worse than just normal card processing set to high security. I remember seeing layers on layers of third-party Javascript with questionable provenance, lots of personal questions. I tried to work around it all for a bit because I really wanted to support them (I've been reading Salon since they launched) but eventually just threw up my hands in despair and figured they were probably doomed anyway because surely I was not the only one having the same experience. :-(
I expect a lot more of this, partly for the monetization issue, but also because these sites went all-in on SEO and then Google AI ate their lunch. Who wants to pore over a 3 page rambling “article” that contains one or two sentences of useful info when an LLM can read and summarize it?
A whole class of site is on the chopping block as ad revenue and clicks dry up. For actual journalism worth paying for increasingly paywalls are popping up to compensate for these factors.
> I expect a lot more of this, partly for the monetization issue, but also because these sites went all-in on SEO and then Google AI ate their lunch. Who wants to pore over a 3 page rambling “article” that contains one or two sentences of useful info when an LLM can read and summarize it?
I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.
And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.
If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.
Your taste is clearly not the driving force behind media consumption in the 21st century, for better or worse. In fact it hasn't been for quite some time. You kind of hit the nail on the head at the end though... media used to be something that was primarily consumed by relatively educated people with enough leisure time to sit around and read. Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.
So yes, people lack media literacy. Billions of people currently online are experiencing their first generation of exposure to the what the world of news and other media has to offer in any real sense. Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
> You kind of hit the nail on the head at the end though... media used to be something that was primarily consumed by relatively educated people with enough leisure time to sit around and read.
I mean, I think there are numerous things to point to explain such things, but I think the two big ones would be:
* The ongoing deadening of our attention spans and the normalization of products that foster addiction in their users often to the detriment of those users to drive profits
* The ongoing attacks on education fostered by the right wing here and elsewhere creating a more ignorant, and less literate electorate. Media literacy itself requiring literacy to be taught, and as is touted frequently, most people can't read above 6th grade.
> Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.
I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "TV democratized media"? TV (and radio really) is still incredibly centralized, now more than ever. As to a marketplace of information, I don't think information is the issue at hand, we have more information now than at any time in human history. Almost all of us carry a device in our pockets that would give us the answer to any question we had, were we so inclined to ask, yet misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are perhaps more prolific than ever before.
What is lacking now, IMO, is the ability for the reader, again, to think critically and sort the wheat from the chaff of that massive wellspring of information. Which follows neatly into...
> Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
I'm not calling them ignorant, I am stating the fact that they are ignorant. Ignorance is not a criticism, it's the natural state one finds themself in when they are uninformed on a topic. It's also pretty easily fixed unless one is unduly attached to their ignorance in some way that benefits them.
I also don't believe it's strictly their fault that they are ignorant, because our country has spent decades defunding and attacking it's own education system, and other countries similarly, ultimately I believe because a less educated, less thinking electorate is easier to manipulate.
Is it just me or do others feel like this is a "buy me" ad and inevitably someone will purchase the brand at firesale and do something else with it? Didn't that already happen in the past with Salon?
as a young'un, i've only ever known salon as calorie-free partisan nonsense. i have at least vague memory of when VICE was good, and would be sad if they dissolved, but the same does not apply here.
Did Salon used to not be that? Cause first time I saw it was maybe 2012, when it was like the Democrat version of Fox News, but it's much older than that.
This started long before the decline of the open internet and AI. If anything, the shift online covered up a massive hollowing out of the industry. We're getting fewer sources of news, and more national coverage. A lot of stuff that is reported on is coming from a scant number of wire services, or directly from PR teams themselves.
For the most part, your choice of news platform is just a layer of coverage choices and political spin on top of a very thin market of original coverage.
1. By "decline of the open internet and AI" do you mean "decline from the open internet and AI" or "decline of the open internet from AI"?
2. That may be so, but I feel like statements like this, about trends that started before the current thing, have the effect of distracting people from the contemporary causes that are active now.
For instance: a lot of negative social trends currently blamed on modern "screens" and social media had their start long ago, but that doesn't mean smartphones and social media haven't had an extremely negative effect. "Screens" as a problem probably started long ago, with television, but each iteration has become more invasive and more difficult to control, eventually overwhelming many people's ability to choose healthier activities (e.g. there wasn't always something "on" TV that you wanted to watch, which gave you more space to choose to do something else, but that never happens with a smartphone).
I posit things would have likely stabilized at a healthier level without the current technologies, so it's quite right right to blame those technologies for their effects.
I know we point a lot of fingers at social media and/or the dead internet theory - but exactly to your point the process was started simultaneously or a little bit ahead of things like the smartphone, and long before Facebook was a news source.
And each of them can journal on their phones
Long before humans had languages and sense of preservation of culture humanoids were nomadic hunter gatherers
And since language and nation state/religious holy war appeared exponential growth in violence appeared
All the sedentary clinging to old allegory, political tropes, arbitrary academic semantics... oooh this little cabal signed off that I am a journalist! ...ground truth is its all conservatism
We don't need Flock if we are all experience hunter gatherers mobile and able to record shit.
Though 84% of Americans do live within 100 miles of where they grew up. Would be baller if the country just adopted a high speed train system and nomadic cultural practices, less sedentary and car focused practices.
Women, it turns out, do not want to be beat reporters.
And I doubt the pendulum is done swinging. Buckle up! My guess is that journalism will get even more hollowed out, and even more feminized - as with so many other careers (HR, anyone?) it seems we are continuing in the direction of UBI by proxy.
https://web.archive.org/web/20210219012551/https://www.polit...
I'm in the Seattle area now and the Seattle Times has been a great source of independent local and national news. Most local city news orgs have gone under at this point but I'm glad we still have one here.
it was also the era when Microsoft was trying to expand it's dominance in software into new realms as well as into media such as Slate and MSNBC.
See this 1996 cover of Wired Magazine: https://www.originalmagazines.com/products/wired-magazine-ju...
The big difference though is that Slate has always had corporate ownership, first by Microsoft and then by Graham Holdings. It's never really had to stand on its own feet.
It changes at some point, no doubt triggered by the crash of journalism, but it didn't try to be interesting and I gave up on it so far back I don't remember when.
One day without warning, they deleted it.
Complete contempt for writers who were frankly far superior to any on staff. I was just a lurker, I've no personal investment beyond that.
I can't remember the last time since that that I visited the site with intent; the arrogant, contemptuous destruction of brilliant writing - that's Salon's legacy for me.
It's either killing off forums completely, or "upgrading" to the point of being unrecognisable, or requiring everyone to make a new account and ... I can't even be bothered to write it.
I payed for salon briefly in the late 90s. I used to have bets with how many words it would take Paglia to cite Sexual Personnae in literally every one of here articles.
Then it just turned into everything that is cringe about the anti intellectual left. Don’t get me wrong I’ve always been aligned with progressive politics for all 56 years of my life, but Salon just went off the deep end.
https://www.salon.com/2022/10/07/glenn-greenwalds-bromance-w...
https://www.salon.com/1998/10/30/feature1_6/
Very, very different from what you'd expect from Salon in the later years.
I archived it, because the OP didn't really make it clear if salon.com is going offline or not: https://archive.is/PesDo
Nor can we forget David Brooks, the moralizing conservative who left his wife for his research assistant 24 years his junior.
David French accusing Mayor Pete of fixing bread prices, Lulu Garcia-Navarro with more glasses than good faith questions, etc.
Say what you will, but the NYT has a deep bench of shenanigans. They truly love the game.
If you just wanted people to agree with you, Salon definitely had you covered!
you mean this?
https://www.google.com/search?q=white%20people%20site%3Asalo...
In fact, you sell it in all colors and make more money:
https://www.google.com/search?q=black+people+site%3Asalon.co...
It doesn’t have to be good, it just has to sell.
But then someone democratizes the publishing (Substack).
Someone else then mechanizes the producing (LLMs).
And you no longer sell.
Bummer.
I miss suck.com.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suck.com
Suck.com Net.Moguls Internet Mogul Trading Cards:
https://web.archive.org/web/20181211075708/http://www.suck.c...
Rick Adams, Front:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802115113im_/http://www.suc...
Rick Adams, Back:
https://web.archive.org/web/20180802143444im_/http://www.suc...
And the hard hitting funny-because-its-true parody from fuckedcompany.com.
Fucked Company published an excellent documentary on the Digital Entertainment Network.
(It's from "Fucked Company", so obviously it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but who's at work any more these days?)
Classic Dot-Com Era Fucked Company Brock Pierce DEN (Digital Entertainment Network) Documentary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W41Ttr73TqU
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
I rescued this from the Internet Archive before it got taken down, and it was originally posted on the Fuckedcompany.com website, which went defunct in 2007.
Yes, THAT creepy MAGA Bannon Epstein good buddy pedo crypto shill guy, Brock Pierce, who turns into a banana at 20:30 in this video:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=19m42s
Brock Pierce's Relationship With Jeffrey Epstein Went Deeper Than Anyone Knew:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/brock-pierces-relationsh...
Fucked Company:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Oh no :(, the Internet Archive fucked them:
https://web.archive.org/web/2/http://www.fuckedcompany.com/
>Sorry.
>This URL has been excluded from the Wayback Machine.
Alternative alternative archive of the front page, only existing in the web.archive.org snapshot of wayback.archive-it.org snapshot of fuckedcompany.com:
https://web.archive.org/web/20240326164342/https://wayback.a...
Then they went from sorta fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20091016001955/http://www...
To fucked:
https://wayback.archive-it.org/all/20130104195206/http://www...
https://web.archive.org/web/20120217111837/http://www.salon....
Guess that didn't work out. I enjoyed reading their creative journalism before they went all the way in on dogmatic politics.
https://youtube.com/@breakingpoints
That why Salon is disappearing. I used to read it, and I thought it disappeared around the time Brill's Content and The Standard went under.
I haven't seen Salon in a Google search result in years.
That alone has made me much MUCH more leery to subscribe to anything if it's not something that can easily be canceled (For example, using Google play to subscribe to things since they make it easy to unsubscribe).
It's pretty much everywhere. I just assume it of apps on my phone.
Then the credit card processor asks for card details, full address, phone number, captcha, browser fingerprinting, IP address reputation, validate the payment in your bank's app, reject foreign cards, reject prepaid cards, and so on.
Then a customer like me who is literally at the checkout trying to give them money isn't allowed to.
And they're selling digital goods - pixels are free, a non-paying customer doesn't cost them anything!
A whole class of site is on the chopping block as ad revenue and clicks dry up. For actual journalism worth paying for increasingly paywalls are popping up to compensate for these factors.
Us: "Here Google, I've done your bidding to earn higher placement in your search engine"
Google: "Thanks for all the data, idiot. Now we'll show it on our site and claim it as ours"
Our organic traffic is WAY down despite nonstop kowtowing to their demands.
I don't understand this viewpoint at all. I follow specific writers for their voice, not in spite of it. A whole lot of people seem to be hallucinating this past moment in history when news was strictly factual information, delivered with no editorializing, from people who had no opinions or ideas, and I genuinely have no idea what they're talking about. Walter Cronkite would frequently editorialize about events he was reporting. All the major historical men and women of news would, that's... the point, you're not just tuning in to know what happened today, you're tuning in to experience those events through the eyes of someone you've at least got some vague trust relationship with.
And I categorically reject any notion that it's better to get a summary via AI. I can clock articles written with heavy AI use and I dislike their monotone and... well, inhuman writing style. Frequently, especially as of late, current events need the touch of an empathetic human with their own ideas.
If you require your news filtered through a bias-remover, IMO you just lack media literacy. I can read something from someone I disagree with on basically everything and still get the facts out of it. Frankly: skill issue.
So yes, people lack media literacy. Billions of people currently online are experiencing their first generation of exposure to the what the world of news and other media has to offer in any real sense. Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
I mean, I think there are numerous things to point to explain such things, but I think the two big ones would be:
* The ongoing deadening of our attention spans and the normalization of products that foster addiction in their users often to the detriment of those users to drive profits
* The ongoing attacks on education fostered by the right wing here and elsewhere creating a more ignorant, and less literate electorate. Media literacy itself requiring literacy to be taught, and as is touted frequently, most people can't read above 6th grade.
> Then the radio and TV democratized that to an extent, but nothing has remade the marketplace for information like the internet and smartphones.
I'm not sure what you're referring to when you say "TV democratized media"? TV (and radio really) is still incredibly centralized, now more than ever. As to a marketplace of information, I don't think information is the issue at hand, we have more information now than at any time in human history. Almost all of us carry a device in our pockets that would give us the answer to any question we had, were we so inclined to ask, yet misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda are perhaps more prolific than ever before.
What is lacking now, IMO, is the ability for the reader, again, to think critically and sort the wheat from the chaff of that massive wellspring of information. Which follows neatly into...
> Instead of wagging a finger at them and calling them ignorant lets accept all of what's changed and adapt accordingly.
I'm not calling them ignorant, I am stating the fact that they are ignorant. Ignorance is not a criticism, it's the natural state one finds themself in when they are uninformed on a topic. It's also pretty easily fixed unless one is unduly attached to their ignorance in some way that benefits them.
I also don't believe it's strictly their fault that they are ignorant, because our country has spent decades defunding and attacking it's own education system, and other countries similarly, ultimately I believe because a less educated, less thinking electorate is easier to manipulate.